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Lady Jane Lumley's Iphigenia at Aulis exemplifies the process of dramatic reproduction in the mid-sixteenth century and in 2014. Lumley's translation (ca 1554) of Euripides' tragedy is a text which revivifies the past to confront the emotional consequences of betrayal and loss. In the sixteenth-century context of Lumley's own family, her translation disturbs and manages the emotional consequences of her father's involvement in the sacrifice of Lady Jane Grey to fulfil the family's political ambitions. My historicist approach juxtaposes a consideration of the play's performances in the Rose Company Theatre in 2014. Drawing on interviews with the director and actors and my observation of spectators' reactions, I discuss the production's testing of the script's immediacy for audiences in a present which had its own preoccupations with the past; namely, the centenary of the outbreak of World War I.

Tragedy, Aristotle tells us, is a mimēsis of a praxis. Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis not only imitates an action: it is an exploration of the very possibility of action, both dramatic and political. Produced posthumously in the Spring of 405 BCE, the play is structured by aporia, a paralysis of political will that also paralyzes the plot and threatens to unwrite reality itself. The play attempts to loosen this bind by rooting political decision in the individual will of an autonomous agent, first Agamemnon, then Iphigeneia. But this process fails: the play's many and notorious changes of mind identify decision as the political act par excellence, but also represent the moment of decision as a madness (in Kierkegaard's phrase), as the agent, far from generating his or her own act, is subsumed and obliterated by it. The dramatic aporia resolved by the character's choice is merely shifted to that choice itself, which exposes the mysterious gap between praxis and prattōn. Moreover, to the extent that the play succeeds in suturing action to an agent, that individual agent – simultaneously savior and scapegoat – effaces the collective deliberation of democratic politics: real political agency is replaced by the fantasy of a super-subject who will act on behalf of and in place of the demos. Staging praxis as a problem, the play's mimēsis becomes a meditation on the failure of political agency and of democratic politics

Tragedy, Aristotle tells us, is a mimēsis of a praxis. Euripides' Iphigeneia at Aulis not only imitates an action: it is an exploration of the very possibility of action, both dramatic and political. Produced posthumously in the Spring of 405 BCE, the play is structured by aporia, a paralysis of political will that also paralyzes the plot and threatens to unwrite reality itself. The play attempts to loosen this bind by rooting political decision in the individual will of an autonomous agent, first Agamemnon, then Iphigeneia. But this process fails: the play's many and notorious changes of mind identify decision as the political act par excellence, but also represent the moment of decision as a madness (in Kierkegaard's phrase), as the agent, far from generating his or her own act, is subsumed and obliterated by it. The dramatic aporia resolved by the character's choice is merely shifted to that choice itself, which exposes the mysterious gap between praxis and prattōn. Moreover, to the extent that the play succeeds in suturing action to an agent, that individual agent – simultaneously savior and scapegoat – effaces the collective deliberation of democratic politics: real political agency is replaced by the fantasy of a super-subject who will act on behalf of and in place of the demos. Staging praxis as a problem, the play's mimēsis becomes a meditation on the failure of political agency and of democratic politics ; Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación